Have I ever told you how much I love coffee? Oh, I have? Well, sorry, but I must tell you again; I love coffee. Whew, glad I got that off my chest. { I am known in my family for saying, "few things in life are as satisfying as ice cream". And I stand by that. But on a cold morning on a ski trip, nothing is as satisfying as coffee. Good coffee, of course :) } Anyway here are a few brief notes made while drinking coffee...

So, there's this new online payment service called TextPayMe which lets people send money to each other with text messages. "We just want to take over the world in all face-to-face transactions." Let me just say, as a veteran of the PayPal wars, this is not going to work. Not because it won't work - I'm sure they'll fix the inevitable problems with security, and fraud - but it won't work because people really don't send much money to each other. Really. PayPal has gotten traction as a payment service for purchases, first on eBay, and later on many other websites. Very little of PayPal's traffic was ever person-to-person, there just isn't that much demand.

Bonus note: did you know that PayPal started as a service to let people "beam" money from one Palm Pilot to another? True. They only added a web interface for sending payments as an afterthought, and then eBayers discovered it as a good way to settle auctions. The rest is history.

I think this is really cool - the MusicBrainz tagger, a service that let's you identify music by the way it sounds, which then correctly tags your MP3s with the artist, track, album, etc. This is a great way to fix bogus tagging on random downloads.

Are you a cricket fan? You probably know that the Indian-Pakistan matches just took place, those countries' answer to Yankees-Red Sox, with national pride thrown in for good measure. Om Malik reports the matches are available on YourTube, kind of a Napster for video. So the videos are there, but it is cricket?

Kathy Sierra: The Clueless Manifesto. "Cluelessness is underrated. It's the newbie who does something he didn't know was supposed to be impossible. It's the naive guy asking the one dumb question any clued-in person would diss. And it's that question that leads to the answer no expert would have found." Well, sometimes, maybe. Other times the Clueless flounder exploring paths which experts already know lead to nothing. I'm generally a fan of experts :) [ via Robert Scoble ]